1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multi-protocol fabric module and in particular to a remote bus personality module. More specifically, modules and methods of use are described and include memory sharing across a fabric, the ability to access physically remote I/O devices across this fabric, and the sharing of physically remote I/O devices, such as storage peripherals.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, network systems used different topologies, e.g. Ethernet architecture employed a spanning tree type of topology. Recently, Ethernet fabric topology has been developed that provides a higher level of performance, utilization, availability and simplicity. Such Ethernet fabric topologies are flatter and self-aggregating in part because of the use of intelligent switches in the fabric that are aware of the other switches and can find shortest paths without loops. One benefit is that Ethernet fabric topologies are scalable with high performance and reliability. Ethernet fabric data center architectures are available from Juniper, Avaya, Brocade, and Cisco.
A “shared nothing architecture” is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient. Typically, none of the nodes share memory or disk storage. A shared nothing architecture is popular for web development because of its scalability. What is deficient in typical shared nothing clusters are the ability to load/store from remote memory, perform remote DMA transactions, and perform remote interrupts.